PC Devs Want DirectX To 'Go Away,' says AMD

PCs usually have higher specs and far more horse power than your standard home console like the PS3 and Xbox 360, and certainly far more than the Nintendo Wii. However, most games appear to look about the same, if not only slightly better, on a PC. AMD's Richard Huddy has pinned the problem on the work environment devs work in, specifically, Microsoft's DirectX API, something that developers apparently want to "go away."

"It's funny. We often have at least ten times as much horsepower as an Xbox 360 or a PS3 in a high-end graphics card, yet it's very clear that the games don't look ten times as good. To a significant extent, that's because, one way or another, for good reasons and bad - mostly good, DirectX is getting in the way," Huddy said.

"I certainly hear this in my conversations with games developers and I guess it was actually the primary appeal of [Intel's CPU/GPU hybrid Larrabee] to developers "“ not the hardware, which was hot and slow and unimpressive, but the software "“ being able to have total control over the machine, which is what the very best games developers want. By giving you access to the hardware at the very low level, you give games developers a chance to innovate, and that's going to put pressure on Microsoft "“ no doubt at all,"

"If we drop the API, then people really can render everything they can imagine, not what they can see "“ and we'll probably see more visual innovation in that kind of situation," he added. "Wrapping it up in a software layer gives you safety and security, but it unfortunately tends to rob you of quite a lot of the performance, and most importantly it robs you of the opportunity to innovate."